Unable to control online radicalism, police have little option but to plead
with Muslim women to dissuade their menfolk from enlisting

If an Islamic terrorist is apprehended in Detroit or blows himself up in Stockholm, it doesn’t usually take long to trace their career progression back to Britain. The CIA despairingly refers to “Londonistan”, but the phrase doesn’t quite do justice to Britain’s ability to incubate terrorism all over the country. For various reasons – chiefly our being quicker to accept asylum-seekers than expel villains – Britain has ended up as a kind of finishing school for jihadis.

So it is no great surprise to learn that an estimated 400 Brits have so far been to Syria to join the rebels – after which, it is feared, they’ll return home radicalised by Islamist insurgents. It’s a fast-growing trend. Last year, the number of Syria-related arrests here was one every two weeks. So far this year, there has been one every two days. This explains the police’s unprecedented appeal to Muslim women, asking them to dissuade (or inform on) menfolk who enlist. It’s not clear how plausible such advice is, but there’s not much else the police feel able to do.

The war on terror, in Britain, has not been about border control or keeping an eye on foreign terror plots. Our terrorists tend to be home-grown, with one or two major attacks foiled every year. Only the 2005 London bombings were successful, but MI5 still has its eye on hundreds of suspects.

Over the years, police have come to work out how young men, with every opportunity in life, manage to walk down the road to radicalisation. Fighting terrorism involves a combination of policing, intelligence and psychology.

At the start, British jihadis could often be traced to foreign training camps. With 250,000 travelling to Pakistan each year, it was easy for a few to slink off undetected to al-Qaeda bases in the badlands. As the drone bombing campaign made it harder to operate such camps, they popped up in Africa – some of them dedicated to attacks on Britain. About 50 British nationals are understood to have attended the camps in Somalia, but it’s a hard place to reach. There are tales of would-be terrorists having their passports confiscated, so they can never leave. For the typical jetset jihadi, the African camps are a remote and risky option.

Syria is far easier. It can be reached by a fairly cheap flight to Turkey, and a handler can escort you over the border. But, as police are now pointing out, after that you have no control. Those genuinely seeking to do humanitarian work are at the mercy of whoever provides the transport. Even those seeking to fight Bashar al-Assad’s forces can end up being sucked into one of the many rebel vs rebel battles. There are Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the Islamic Front – groups who fight each other as well as Assad. With no clear battle lines, no one who travels there can be sure whose side they’ll end up on.

Most of those who return pose no threat to British national security – but a handful do. Radicalised by the horrors that they have seen, and having made a whole set of unsavoury contacts, a minority of Syria veterans could start to work against British interests. Security services believe that post-Syria terror plots have already started to hatch here. Shiraz Maher, a radicalisation expert at King’s College in London, said yesterday that eight out of nine who return from Syria pose no threat – maybe so. But a one-in-nine ratio is bad enough when Britain is looking at hundreds of fighters coming back.

The difference this time is that there is no training camp in Syria to attract willing jihadis. There has only been the emergence of the biggest training camp of all: social media, a force which has come into its own in the conflict. The official jihadi groups tend to have their accounts closed down, but others spread the word. On YouTube, the world’s biggest video website, you can see a video of a Brit showing the viewer around his makeshift garrison. “Come to the lands of jihad!” he says cheerfully at the end. “Live amongst us. By Allah, it’s better than living where you are.”

Such invitations have been enough to bring the number of Westerners travelling to Syria to an estimated 3,000. For once, Britain does not really stand out. Germany and the Netherlands have both seen hundreds of their citizens head there. Jihadi veterans of the Bosnia campaign are taking up arms again. In the old days, Osama bin Laden would make a home video, throw it out of a cave and hope it made its way to Al Jazeera. The Syria conflict is unlike any other because foreign fighters keep in touch via Twitter and Facebook, making their own films and their own propaganda. This is peer-to-peer indoctrination being carried out to an extent never seen in any conflict before.

As you might expect, this form of cyber-jihad has been pioneered in Britain. During the Iraq war, a Londoner, Younes Tsouli, set up a website showing the best jihadi videos. He attracted the admiration of al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq, who fed him material. He ran an online message board service, where prospective suicide bombers could be linked up with al-Qaeda. (“I’m ready to run off but I’m under 18,” asked one user. “Am I too young?” “They have no objection to age,” came the reply).

It doesn’t take a counter-terrorism manual to understand how young men can be brainwashed into joining a foreign war. Take Muriel Spark’s 1961 book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It tells of a powerful, charismatic school teacher who has a picture of fascist troops on the wall and tries to mould the identities of her students. One of her protégées, Joyce Emily, is persuaded to “see sense” and fight with the fascists in Spain, where she dies. When one of the pupils is asked, in later life, whether her main influences had been political or religious, she replies: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”

There are plenty of Islamists in their prime today, and it’s never been easier to hear them. One is Ahmad Musa Jibril, an American who does not directly endorse violence in Syria but acts as a cheerleader for the Westerners fighting there. Another is Musa Cerantonio, an Australian who converted from Catholicism and speaks in English, and is less guarded about his support for jihad. The days where you needed to attend a hardline mosque to hear radical imams – or somehow find a contraband video – are over. The digital skills that made Younes Tsouli stand out five years ago are now everywhere. And has taken the great game of counter-terrorism to another level.

The extent of all this was shown by Maher and two other academics from King’s College, London, who tracked down scores of foreign fighters and analysed their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Jibril and Cerantonio were the most followed figures. Neither is doing or saying anything illegal, but both have a message that demonstrably resonates with Western fighters. Just as importantly, the influence Syria’s foreign fighters have on each other is just as strong.

The size of Britain’s terrorism problem has, so far, been matched by the ability of security services to cope with it. That there have been 385 terrorism-related convictions since the September 11 attacks shows the scale of the battle on the home front. The threat has mutated, and the spies have adapted with it. But the idea of cutting off the supply of radicalising material is being steadily abandoned. Syria has become the first war in the era of cyber-jihad – which makes the wider battle against terrorism harder still.